No no no!
Cut!
I know what you're thinking: Another typical college sales pitch.
Typical! Ha! That's not how we do things here at Duke.
Being at Duke has allowed me to have a variety of experiences, from traveling to China to
teach over 2,000 students English and dance and theater to sitting next to an Emmy award
winning professor as he teaches me to edit my first documentary.
I took a divinity class and flipped through the pages of a diary of one of the first female
missionaries with a pair of tweezers. It was less like being a student and more like being
an explorer.
Duke students and alumni do amazing things. Their success is the product of carefully
crafting a university that selects and empowers extraordinary people. Need-blind admissions
is at the heart of what makes Duke exceptional. We recruit and enroll the best and brightest
students, regardless of their ability to pay and then we meet their financial aid need.
This builds a diverse community of young people drawn from the United States and around the world.
When I was applying to colleges, I was looking for need-blind schools because I knew that
a need-blind school would take me for my merits.
It really makes for like a very formative college experience because I don't think there's
any other time in your life where you're going to get to be exposed to so many different
types of people.
It all starts in the classroom. Most of our classes are small and our faculty members
are leaders in their fields, and more than half of Duke undergraduates complete faculty-mentored
research projects.
It's an amazing feeling when the professors or the staff are so invested in what you're
doing and want you coming back so that they can help you and mentor you through the entire process.
To have the experience of being able to do research as an undergraduate, I mean it was
just amazing to get that opportunity.
A Duke education is not limited to the classroom. We go to developing nations. We volunteer
in local schools. We work with small start-up companies and big corporations, community
groups and non-profits to tackle challenging problems. Then we connect these experiences
with what we're learning in the classroom and through our research.
I did a corporate finance internship for a for-profit education company and I absolutely
fell in love with the company in Rio and I did a number of things at the company: strategic
planning, investor relations, all in Portuguese.
The chance to volunteer in the hospital, learn about what medicine is like, gave me the idea
that well, maybe I could do this too, maybe it would be a great career to be a doctor.
Duke's rich array of facilities, clubs, religious groups, athletics and arts brings people together
and inspires them.
One of my favorite experiences at Duke was being an RA. It was a really neat experience
for me and also gave me the ability to see how much I enjoy working with young people.
I learned a lot of lessons through football and one of them is you can't be afraid to
try. You can't be afraid to put your, put everything on the line because when you put
everything on the line, that's when you actually grow, whether you're successful or not.
This is all made possible through the generous financial support of Duke's alumni and friends,
enabling the university to more than double our spending on undergraduate financial aid
during the past decade.
I really wanted to come to Duke. I loved Duke, but I didn't think that I would be able to
afford to go at all because financial aid packages that I'd gotten from other universities
I'd been accepted to still had me taking out a lot of loans.
Once I sort of saw the financial aid package that Duke was providing, that really did make
a difference.
Duke is so generous with the amount of money that they can give to their students and I
wouldn't be having the experience that I have right now if it wasn't for the support that they give.
Why take so much time and care creating this hand-crafted experience? Because it shapes
people who can make positive change happen.
When I was at Duke, I got to create my own major and what it gave me the opportunity
to see is that you really have this entrepreneurial opportunity around education and when I left
Duke and started my own business, I think Duke gave me that confidence and it also gave
me the ability to think through what was important for me.
I have technology that I wrote a year out of Duke that is monitoring some critical infrastructure
and there are thousands of users for some of the stuff that I've built.
I'm interested in helping out individuals, giving them the ability to walk again, so
I'm pursuing a career in podiatry.
I think what Duke has really given me is it's given me choice and I couldn't ask for anything better.
Now that you've heard our story, what do you think a Duke education is worth? Visit duke.edu
to explore the many ways that we're working hard to improve the world around us.